I have written several times on this blog recently about Dancing Rabbit Eco-Village, an off-the-grid growing community in NE Missouri that is dedicated to sustainable, community-oriented living. Well, Billy and I are going to Dancing Rabbit next week, as part of their visitor program. We will be camping out, eating with a vegan food co-op (yeah!), and learning all about life at Dancing Rabbit–how the community makes decisions, builds housing, grows food, creates energy . . . even how composting toilets work. I am quite excited to see how a truly sustainable community can work, and to meet the no-doubt passionate and interesting people who live in an eco-village.

I will be giving a Sunday platform address on our visit some time this fall to share our experience, impressions, and ethical lessons. Please let me know if you have specific questions about Dancing Rabbit that I can look into during our visit.

Dancing Rabbit does have internet access, as evident from their excellent web site, but this visit also begins my July vacation, and I am planning to take an electronic vacation as well as a physical one, so this blog will be on hiatus until sometime in August. Have a good summer, everyone, and try to take a break from technology yourself if possible. Your body and mind and probably your loved ones will thank you.

Check out the moving stories in the comments in the nytimes article on the same-sex marriages taking place in California now and hopefully forever. Some couples are getting married for the second or third time to the same person because of our medieval national marriage laws. But ethical evolution continues to advance: Congratulations to all you California couples!

Monday June 16 at 7pm, George Lakoff will be at the Central Library (Olive and 13th) to promote his new book, The Political Mind. I haven’t read it, but I have read his previous books Moral Politics and Don’t Think of an Elephant, and it sounds from interviews that this new book is more of the same, with additional findings of brains studies of liberals and conservatives.

Lakoff’s basic idea in these books is that liberals and conservatives have different ‘cognitive frames’ through which they experience the world, and that these frames determine the dangers that each group is more sensitive to and the kinds of solutions they prefer. Lakoff is a liberal, so his bias is toward the liberal frame and his hope is that liberals can use both frames to convince independents and perhaps even conservatives to adopt their policies. There’s a primer on Lakoff’s frames on Wikipedia.

I like Lakoff’s work because I believe that many of us live our lives based on metaphors and stories that we tell ourselves about the world, consciously or unconsciously. I would prefer that we all become more aware of these stories and better able to adapt them compassionately and realistically, rather than manipulate others using stories, but at least Lakoff brings some of these ideas to light.

I described Lakoff’s frames and how they relate to liberal and conservative religion in my platform address “The Religious Left and Civil Rights” (go to our podcasts page and scroll way down to Feb 2006 if you want to hear it).

General Motors is phasing out SUVs and Hummers and will be selling the electric Volt in the next two years. Hell is slowly freezing over, which might mean the Arctic may not melt–or may at least re-freeze after melting, as turning around global warming is probably not going to happen fast enough. But I’m growing hopeful. One of our major political parties has a nominee of color! If California becomes the first state to actually vote to give same-sex couples equal marriage rights this November, I will be more optimistic about the ethical evolution of humanity than I’ve been in a long time.

There are more and more stories popping up in the news about people making changes to try to avoid the high gas prices–trying to make do with less than one-car-per-person in a family, biking, motorcycling, even (gasp!) using public transportation. And people who have to drive a car are opting for smaller cars when they can.

I have to say, I think it’s good. I’m glad that gas is so expensive and I hope it stays this way. I know that it’s a true hardship for some people, and I hope that some way can be found to help them out (better and cheaper public transportation? Car/van sharing?). But for most of us, I suspect, it’s more a matter of inconvenience–or rather, of discovering that what we thought we couldn’t live without, we can, when costs become high enough.

“Lifestyle creep” is when we get used to new luxuries and start seeing them as necessities. Having grown up in the seventies, I can recall that families used to get along fine without SUVs, that people adjusted their schedules in order to carpool, share a car, or take public transportation to work. We’ve become so used to doing whatever we want whenever we want it, we start to believe it’s our right. We don’t really have a right to pollute the air and warm the globe, but that’s too abstract and long-term to motivate most of us. So these high gas prices are starting to do what our consciences could not–halt and even reverse transportation lifestyle creep. I also remember how this started to happen in the seventies, and then energy prices fell again and we threw our new energy-saving ways out the window. The best scenario would be if today’s high energy prices lead to a boom in clean energy, but until then, unlike those people who were praying for lower gas prices, I’m hoping they stay high and go higher. Better some pain and adjustment now than to continue in the unsustainable way we’ve been going.

Have you made any adjustments in your life because of pain at the pump? Are you considering making any changes? Or, what would it take for you? $5/gallon? More?

I don’t know if it’s all the colds I’ve had recently, or the fact that I’d rather be working in the garden, but I’m feeling blogged out. So instead of wracking my brain to write about something just for the sake of writing, I thought I’d ask you all–What topics would you like to see me address? What questions would you like me to tackle?

This goes for the blog and also for the upcoming platform address season of September ‘09 - May ‘10. (The Ethical Society has regular platform meetings all summer, but I only give one address between May and September. This summer we will be having guest speakers on ethics and the arts, on our relationship with the environment, and on other great topics.) I am now planning next season’s platform addresses, so if there’s a topic, issue, question, or whathaveyou that you’d like me to speak on, let me know.

I posted several weeks ago about Dancing Rabbit eco-village in Missouri. Turns out it was featured a few years ago in the TV show “30 Days,” which puts people in radically unfamiliar (for them) environments for 30 days to see what they learn from the experience (and to make money for the network by playing up the resulting drama, of course). To see the “30 Days” show in which two urban New Yorkers spend a month at Dancing Rabbit, click here. To read the perhaps even more interesting ‘What Really Happened’ report from Dancing Rabbit members, click here, and become (even) more skeptical of reality TV.

Still, it was fascinating to watch the adjustment of two average Americans to go from eco-footprints of 12.5 Earths to footprints of 1.2. I don’t know if the show does updates, but I’d like to know if they were able to make any permanent changes when they returned to their “normal” lives. Goodness knows, the definition of “normal” is going to have to change soon, whether we like it or not.

This morning the press reports that international aid is finally being accepted by the Myanmar government, following the devastating cyclone there several days ago. If you would like to donate to help the victims, charitynavigator.com has a page listing 4-star charities related to Myanmar aid–also see their page on tips for giving during a crisis.

Periodically members ask what the rules are about political speech at a religious organization such as the Ethical Society. In brief, religious organizations can take official positions on issues and lobby for those positions, provided that they do not spend a “significant” amount of their resources on political activities. (The IRS doesn’t specify what would be significant.) What religious organizations can NOT do is endorse or oppose specific candidates. The staff and clergy of religious organizations can endorse or oppose candidates as individuals, as long as they are clearly speaking only for themselves.

So it’s legal for the Ethical Society to support universal health care or a death penalty moratorium, for instance. It would not be legal for us to campaign for or against a specific candidate. Generally, the Society limits the positions we take on issues, as we seek to be a place where people of differing views can be comfortable and learn from each other. Our Ethical Action Committee takes positions more often, clearly stating that they are not speaking for the entire Society.

It’s often difficult to balance the desire of many members to have the Society take a stand on important issues, and the desire of other members to maintain a more neutral Society that can act as a place for dialog. My belief is that we should act to affirm and defend the worth and dignity of every person, such as by opposing torture and the death penalty, and by promoting equal marriage and universal health care. However, people can often disagree on the best method of affirming worth, and rights are often in conflict, so it is probably best that we are careful about too freely taking official stands.

What do you think? Would you like to see the Ethical Society take more official positions on ethical issues of our day? Less official positions? Different ones? Or are we keeping a good balance?

Yesterday I attended a lecture at Wash U by ethicist Peter Singer, who has long been a favorite of mine for works such as How Are We to Live? and The Ethics of What We Eat.

Yesterday’s lecture was a presentation of the ideas from his 1999 NY Times article “The Singer Solution to World Poverty.” I recommend you read it if you haven’t already. Singer’s solution, in a nutshell, is that those of us who can afford luxuries such as dining out, going to the movies, buying clothes when we already have clothes, etc., should stop buying luxuries and instead donate a lot more money to nonprofits that help the world’s poor. Singer himself donates 20% of his income to charity, according to accounts. (He more recently continues his arguments in the article “What Should a Billionaire Give–and What Should You?”)

Singer is a utilitarian philosopher, and so his primary focus is on logically proving the “rightness” of his solution. I am a pragmatist, however, and my focus is on motivating people’s actions. It doesn’t matter (I submit) what we theoretically agree is “right” to do if we’re still not going to do it. Singer admits that his arguments are unlikely to sway many people to do the right thing but believes that just knowing that we’re failing to do the right thing is a step in the right direction. I’m afraid such knowledge (assuming we’ll let ourselves agree with his logic, which is a big assumption) without action just hardens us, making us more cynical and let likely to act. I may be wrong about that, but clearly the important thing is not the logical argument but overcoming the emotional justifications that keep us swathed in luxuries while millions die preventable deaths everyday.

So here’s my question. What is it that motivates you to sacrifice for a greater good, however you define it? If you’ve given money and time to causes or inconvenienced yourself to help the environment, what was it that made you do that? Were you persuaded by a logical argument, moved by a story or image, inspired by an ideal? What keeps you from giving, or from giving more than you do? This is the information we need to make utilitarian ethics pragmatic reality.